Your young adult child comes to you with a big decision that she has to make. She is coming to seek your advice, your wisdom, and your counsel. She explains the dilemma in detail and goes back and forth with all the “what-ifs” and “if-onlys” and “but I want to’s”. While talking to her you share some stories from your life and you give her some things to think about, but at the end you slip in this small sentence, “I just want you to be happy.”
This small sentence is what I remember most from those conversations with my own mom years ago. Over the years I have thought about this a lot – this advice I was given to just be happy – and I have contemplated how it shaped my thinking about the decisions I made. For me as a young adult, happiness was all I really wanted. I did not want pain or discomfort and tension, and I did everything I could to avoid it. My maturity kept my vision at the right now in my life, and the decision I wanted to make in the right now was usually one that would bring me immediate happiness.
So, I wonder, is this the advice I want to give my future children one day – that I just want them to be happy?
I understand my mom’s intentions. They were good and pure. And I understand what she was trying to say. Yes, of course she wanted me to be happy. All parents hope that their children are happy. But I don’t know about “just happy”. The word “just” makes me think of the right now. “Just do it”, “Just sit down”, “Just stop talking.” In my young adult mind I was already at the “just”. I needed to see past the “just” to the road ahead and what this decision to “just be happy” might bring me later.
The word “just” also makes me think of “only”. Do I want my children to “only be happy”? Of course not! I want them to have a lot more than happiness – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. They do bring happiness, but happiness is their by-product. These, deeper qualities, are like endless spring of water that produce happiness repeatedly, but not constantly and not consistently. Most of the time it takes trials of discomfort to produce them. So the happiness we seek for our children is not always in the immediate, but through the endurance that produces the deeper, more withstanding.
Does God want my future children to “just be happy”?
I have learned from experience absolutely not! Yes, He wants me to be happy, just like my earthly parents do, but He has a much bigger plan for me than to just be happy. If this were not the case, then my life would always be blissful! God’s first and primary concern for me is to become like Him (Ephesians 4:24).
I think instead of saying to my future children, “I just want you to be happy”, I want to say, “I just want you to pursue God.” Pursuing God will be bumpy and unpleasant at times, and happiness may not be anywhere on the horizon, but eventually it will come – through the Fruit of the Spirit – as a by-product of something deeper – becoming like Christ. This is God’s will for our children – to do whatever it takes to make them like Him!
What about you? Did you grow up hearing the advice “I just want you to be happy” or do you say this to your children?
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